I coulda fooled me.

Placebos can be effective in medical treatments--even if the patients taking them know that they're not actual medications, researchers from Harvard Medical School's (HMS) Osher Research Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have discovered.

In the study, researchers selected 80 individuals who were suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and divided them into two groups. The first received no treatment, while the others were given placebos, told that they were effectively just sugar pills, and were told to take them two times each day for a period of three weeks.

Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had 'placebo' printed on the bottle," HMS Associate Professor of Medicine Ted Kaptchuk said in a statement Wednesday. "We told the patien"ts that they didn't have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills."

According to an HMS press release, by the end of the trial, nearly twice as many of those who received the placebo treatment reported "adequate symptom relief" (59 percent) when compared to the control group (35 percent). The results showed that those patients taking the placebo showed improvement rates "to a degree roughly equivalent to the effects of the most powerful IBS medications."